PLCs have been widely used in numerous industries. They are commonly used in the control of machinery, such as factory assembly lines and manufacturing equipment. Current PLCs, however, do not have the capability to implement advanced control methods, such as the Model Predictive Control method, due to limited computational power and a lack of a framework capable of implementing MPC with that limited computational power. That limitation has significantly affected the application of PLCs in chemical plants, oil refineries and similar applications.
Current PLC system design does not provide for advanced control methods. Instead, only simple control algorithms such as proportional/integral/derivative (PID) control may be implemented as the system function to be used by the PLC. If not impossible, it would require prohibitive engineering effort to manually implement an MPC algorithm in current PLC platform.